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Canto XIX/1 Popes are not uncommon in Dante's Hell and they are mostly clustered here, stuffed upside down and one on top of another. The papal arms stand for all these simoniac Popes and they are seen much degraded by the process of etching and re-etching a line drawing so that it begins to disintegrate. The version of the papal arms used for this was itself doctored by the removal of one of the two keys, i. e. the keys to Heaven and Hell that the Pope possesses. Thus these Popes that have misused their high office have forfeited the key to Heaven. Seen upside down the tassels now represent their feet aflame with a parody of anointment. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XIX/2 Here the groundplan of the Baptistry of Florence (mio bel San Giovanni) is shown with a hypothetical arrangement of fonts that would fit both Dante's description and other contemporary accounts. To show the Popes undergoing their mock Baptism and their parodied anointing with the flaming oil, we see their feet projecting from these fonts: all, that is, except the one that Dante mentions having broken in a symbolic act of pious rescue (hence the cross-shaped fracture which implicitly vindicates his action). The general floor design reinforces the Florentine associations of the building to which Dante longed to return in triumph and receive the poet's crown (cf. Canto IV/2). The feet actually used (with some irony and no malice) are those of Mark Boyle, the only feet I could find seen thus (so to speak) head-on. They are taken from 'Journey to the Surface of the Earth' (editions hansjorg mayer). -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XIX/3 This is a further variation on the punishment accorded to the simoniac Popes who we learn are packed below each other in holes. They are here represented by distorted Papal Crosses bearing down one upon another implying that at the bottom of the mock fonts there is a mere pulp of papacy. Their position also mocks the upside-down Crucifixion of their great and traduced predecessor St. Peter whom they deny as he denied Christ (three times as the crosses indicate). The fissure in the rock, also cruciform, as well as echoing the break in the font of the previous image, indicates the cracking of the walls of the Underworld at the moment of Christ's Harrowing of Hell; this is the ruin made by Love which Virgil explains in Canto X. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XIX/4 The misuse of Papal Authority for personal gain is a kind of piracy in high places as Dante states and this is paralleled here by yet another degradation of the Papal Arms as they transform themselves stage by stage into the emblematic cliché of the pirate flag. They betray their station for gold and silver as the coins in the last section indicate, and as its text asserts by means of a pun on the function of the Pastoral Staff and the ambiguity of the word 'crook'. The title (taken from Canto X) is the final ironic reminder of the self-serving behaviour of those who in their lives are meant to think of themselves as the Servant's Servant -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents Canto XV/1 This is the third use of the 'Study' motif (which will appear also in Canto XXXIII/1). Dante's links with two important literary precursors are asserted, firstly by Virgil's study in II/1 and here by the study of his teacher Brunetto Latini whom we meet in this Canto. The naif Tesoretto (which Brunetto begs Dante and the world to remember him by), a simple literary example of the Art of Memory, has many elements that must have impressed the young writer. The poem starts in fact with its protagonist similarly lost in a wood, referred to as una selva mesta: it is this strong pre-echo that I quote in the open book within the picture. Of the original elements of the 'Study' motif I have here retained, apart from the framework itself, the pen and ink of authorship, the cypress with its twin function of phallic ikon and memento mori (though now it overlooks no voluptuous landscape of feminine undulations but a parched desert under a scorching sky), and the three books, one of...

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XV/2 The frontispiece of Canto V is here transposed as a negative image to represent Dante's view of the inverted nature of homosexual passion. The 'treasure' of the interior text once again refers to Brtmetto's work, the Tesoro (Thesaurus) being the only child he can produce in the sterility of this love. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XV/3 Ser Brunetto is here portrayed via one of the heads from the dramatis personae of Canto III/1 . Dante's text is present in my own handwriting (cf. note to VII/4). Of the two book-openings shown the lower one takes on the character of my own Tesoretto (A Humument) containing as it does a repeat of one of the original pages of that work (p. 191). The open book within the open book features the name of Brunetto's poem. Spelled out in this way it forms different words, notably sotto which hints at some Templar implications in the text (the Templars were branded as Sodomites by their persecutors). -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XV/4 In a welter of fire Ser Brunetto races away across the plain. The figure is from a watercolour that I made from one of Muybridge's indispensable photo sequences from The Human Figure in Motion (cf. Canto V/3). Dante's teacher is here seen as if heading for the cloth of green mentioned at the end of the Canto as the prize in a foot-race (in which indeed the runners are naked). The green echoes the shape once again of the lawn of a Folly for Wisdom (cf. Canto IV/1) to show the immortality as poet and savant to which Ser Brunetto seems to aspire. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Canto XVI/1 Another unholy Trinity is presented by the dancing trio of Sodomite politicians whose arms are here made to form an inverted triangle. The manner of the drawing harks back to the polyptych I made in 1965, as an iconographic biography of David Rudkin, for whom (as credits for his TV play The Stone Dance) I made similar doomed and dancing figures. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XVI/2 This bloated distortion of the Florentine lily with newly distended shapes and brashness of colour corresponds to Dante's vilification of his city as a place now swollen with excess. The original Golden Section version of the emblem (cf. Canto 11/2) was used to generate progressively more grotesque variants of the shape on the graphics computer of Leicester Polytechnic under the direction of Stroud Cornock. These parallel Dante's changing vision of his city, its nature, fate and history. The slightly obscured interior text reads 'fine florentine airs glowing with gaudy brilliance'. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XVI/3 As Dante moves downwards through Hell earlier imagery gathers weight in retrospect and images tend more and more to quote each other, attempting to echo Dante's own continuum of transformational recapitulation. This particular illustration quotes backwards and forwards; to Canto 1/2 for the skin of the leopard, to Canto XVII/1 for the coiled patterns of Geryon and to Canto XXIII/3 for the monk's habit. The cord surrounding the picture is that which Dante says he hoped to use to ensnare the leopard. The coarsely woven hessian (taken in fact from an African sack) indicates Dante's almost certain attachment to the Franciscan order whose cord he discovers to be even more powerful than a mere device for combatting lust and luxury: it serves finally to lure Fraud out into the open. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XVI/4 This image serves to hint as the text does at the nature of the beast to be revealed in the next canto, giving similarly misty clues. As will be seen the monster puts on a face to do its work. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents XVII/2 Taking the outline shape of the masks in Canto III/1 the usurers are here depicted according to Dante's (dis)-characterisation as faceless souls. Monotonous in their featurelessness they make the same utterance, as indicated by the thrice reproduced `speechbubble'. They are differentiated only by the emblems of their banking houses (as is indeed the case today). Three are singled out for special mention; the Gianfigliazzi and Ubbriachi of Florence, and the Scrovegni of Padua. The first two were Guelph and Ghibelline respectively which perhaps proves the impartiality of Dante's hatred of their profession: he names their heraldic colours which I have only hinted at to avoid giving splendour to this glum group. The emblematic pig is adapted from that of Canto VI/1 where it represents a sin with similar characteristics of greed and gluttony. It is further transformed in order to illustrate the continuing function of the pig in banking (like all my generation I had a piggy-bank...

Scope and Contents XVII/3 On a recent visit to Italy in 1982, I went to Padua in order to visit the Scrovegni chapel which was originally erected by Enrico Scrovegni the son of that Rinaldo Scrovegni who sits among the usurers of this Canto. It was he also that commissioned Giotto to paint magnificent frescoes. Dante and Giotto were close friends and the writer visited Padua while the painter was at work on the chapel. They must have talked there often, and, if they were typical artists, the conversation must have turned to discussion of money and no doubt threw up the irony that this glory that Giotto was in the process of glorifying was built on the foundations of usury which in turn funded Giotto's own work there. Ezra Pound in his own Cantos devotes a complete section (in homage to this section of the Inferno) on usury asserting that Not by Usura came. . (and here he cites treasures of art and craft). In refuting this assertion of Pound I take the liberty of stylistic parody to suggest that we...

Scope and Contents XVII/4 Dante's powers of physical visualisation (in which he parallels his friend Giotto in his new bodying forth of the world's reality) are unprecedented in literature and one of his greatest achievements is the predictive description of flight which ends this Canto, complete with a conversation between Virgil and Dante that could be that between pilot and novice on a training plane. Flight and 'a flight of stairs' are joined as in a pun to recall Virgil's comment, `It's stairs like these we'll have to travel by. . .' This particular staircase is taken from a diagram in J. V. de Vries' La Perspective' of 1639 (via the TLS via the HRC, Austin, Texas), and also recalls the windingly vertiginous descent that Dante experiences on the back of Geryon. The flight of the little green plane (a rubber stamp from an educational set bought in Sao Paolo) follows the curve of the banister. The stem of the staircase has become the falling river of blood. Perhaps Dante's description here would...

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Canto XVIII/1 The wolf (cf. Canto 1/2) introduces the largest section of the Inferno; the sins of envy and deep malice. The drawing is loosely based on photographs of a stuffed wolf's head, purchased at the photographic archive on the rue de Seine in Paris whose window has fascinated me ever since I was a schoolboy there in 1955. The three-headedness of the animal (a late introduction into the image) recalls the three beasts of Canto I and provides a savage echo of the merely greedy Cerberus. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents XVIII/2 Dante's Hell is a pretty schematic place and no edition of the Comedy is without its map or diagram. Not wishing to be left out, and feeling this to be, as the most complex of the areas of Hell, most in need of some sort of visual aid, I produced here an aerial survey of Malebolge with its ten concentric and descending trenches, each filled with the type of character or action that it holds. The nature of the plan reminds one too of the airborne approach that the poets make on the back of Geryon (whose departing tail disappears into the left of the picture). The bridges that span the ravines are broken, as the map shows, at the sixth: this may be more clearly seen in the cross-section diagram at the bottom of the picture. Above this cavorts a crowd of the type of inhabitants that we are to meet. At the very base of the image is the word Malebolge with a suggested English translation, Malcavities, which I intended to use in the text but decided rather to instance only here....

Scope and Contents XVIII/3 We see here the crafty Jason, half-masked by the image of Hypsipyle fading in his mind after he had abandoned her (the model for this figure drawn from the life onto the original etching plate was Anthea Toorchen). Once again the head is taken from the dramatis personae of III/1. The arrows are overlaid by what is now a distant cousin (a photographic offset reproduction of an etching of a transparency of an offset reproduction of an original photograph after nature) of a magazine illustration of a freeway in Los Angeles.. The very deviousness of such a procedure seems appropriate to the image of Jason, whose seafaring and convoluted artfulness are also indicated by overlaying wave patterns on the road-system. The directional arrows (cf. Canto X/4) refer to what must be the first mention in literature of traffic-control; a simple prelude, in Dante's description of what is nowadays called a contraflow-system operating on the Sant Angelo bridge in the Jubilee year of 1300, of...

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XVIII/4 Since we have here another immersion, this time in excrement, I have taken another bather from the original group (cf. Canto XII/1) to represent the whore Thais. Her head derives from one of the miniature masks of Canto 111/1, though here much more 'degraded' even than usual. Vague suggestions of frilly lace linger about the image, and these in the original were applied onto the plate's surface together with the smear of lipstick. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.